1. Technical Field
This disclosure concerns identifying and managing service requests. In particular, this disclosure concerns handling service requests and their related exceptions in a service provider architecture.
2. Background Information
The communications industry continues to face demands for more services, and rapid deployment of new services, while the complexity of the underlying technologies providing the services continues to increase. Service providers require systems that provide both residential and commercial consumers the ability to easily activate and manage requests for services directly and at lower prices. Communications service providers recognize the ability of consumers to choose desired services and take at least basic steps to order the services as a critical market differentiator. Consumers assess service providers based on the number of available services and the ease of activation and use of the services by consumers. Consumers also recognize the cycle-time between initiating a request for a service and service activation as a dominant market differentiator.
Provisioning communication services involves many complex and technical details, and often results in exceptions occurring during the process of obtaining customer information and provisioning services. Unfortunately, the lack of ready-to-use services available from business support systems (BSS) capable of supporting standard processes of communication providers creates technical challenges for service providers. The complexity of new operational support systems (OSS) deployed in support of new network services also creates technical challenges for service providers desiring to hide the complexity from consumers. The continuous desire of providers to differentiate their services from each other drives OSS to introduce more sophisticated services and complex technologies, in addition to life-cycle maintenance issues. The many technical challenges facing service providers include not only improving the experience of consumers in the context of activating and using services, but actually carrying through with a service request and successfully activating the service. Communication service providers use complex systems to track and resolve exceptions arising during the provisioning and operation of services. Current self-provisioning systems currently overwhelm and confuse consumers, discourage consumers from self-provisioning communications services, and the use of such self-provisioning capabilities. Communication service providers currently direct scarce resources to assisting consumers to provision services at the expense of focusing resources on developing and delivering new services.
Communications service providers face many technical challenges to successfully activating services as well as providing consumers with an enhanced ability to self-provision network services. The technical challenges include providing robust and dynamic user interfaces, workflow solutions that provide efficient and elegant exception handling, and service request orchestration. The already immense number of process steps, and potential exceptions that may result in the course of activating and managing network services increase exponentially with the integration of each new network element or service. Unfortunately, current systems may require a consumer to respond to an unreasonable number of exceptions in the course of activating or deactivating a service, further frustrating the consumer. Furthermore, current systems may themselves become the victims of runaway error propagation (e.g., exceptions), leading to overwhelmed system resources, multitudes of partially completed provisioning service requests, and time consuming, expensive, and technically challenging exception resolution.
A need has long existed for a system and method that efficiently and effectively accelerates the self-provisioning of services by managing exceptions, exception queues, and elegantly orchestrating the processing of service requests.